History

Recently I posted a news item about the new Badger book from Devil's Due having low orders. Writer/creator Mike Baron reached out to me about it, and I presume he reached out to some...

When you look at the list of comics publishers who have stayed the course throughout decades of tumultuous changes in distribution and audience, one most usually thinks of Archie, Marvel and DC. Only a...

WOW! Talk about historic finds! DC Comics just tweeted this historic photo from a comics industry Christmas party from 70 years ago. While there is a slight Shining view to it (is that Hank Kanalz I see in the back?), it's also an amazing view into the Golden Age. After it was tweeted DC Comics was kind enough to send me a high res scan which I am sharing with you so all the comics historians out there can pour over it. There is a handwritten guest list as well, but its provenance isn't known so I am not posting it.

While poking around on the A Moment of Cerebus site following my previous post on Glamourpuss, I noticed that the remastered editions of Church & State, perhaps the masterpiece of Cerebus's 300 issue run,...

Well speak of the devil, here's a new Kickstarter from the Locust Moon folks that plans to reprint some long lost early work by Will Eisner. The story of how it came to light...

Will Eisner: Champion of the Graphic Novel is a new book by former DC publisher Paul Levitz that looks at Eisner's historical contribution to comics. And New York magazine has just excerpted the chapter...

The New York Times, which is the one newspaper that never ran comics strips, reverse engineers their insertion into Sunday papers as something of a novelty, instead of an elegy to the death of...

Word going around on Facebook that master inker and comics technical innovator Murphy Anderson has passed away at age 89. Anderson was one of the great DC inkers of all time, providing crisp clean lines that defined the look of Hawkman, Superman, and Adam Strange, and, indeed, the whole DC line of the Silver Age, inking over Carmine Infantino, Gil Kane and most notably, Curt Swan. He was inducted into the Jack Kirby Hall of Fame (precursor of the Eisner HoF) all the way back in 1988, a tribute to his statue in the industry.

New comics company alert! This is one that has been brewing for a while and you will not believe where it's coming from. The New York Review of Book, a publication that usually has the word "august" appended to it, is launching a line of graphic novels, with new editions of classic works by Mark Beyer, Blutch, Glen Baxter and more. The new imprint is in the tradition of their NYRB Classics line of prose reprints (And also a little reminiscent of Dover's recent efforts along those lines.)

Reid Fleming and David Boswell are two of the great legendary figures of the 80s black and white comics boom – Canadian born cartoonist Boswell created an enduring character in the irascible delivery man Reid Fleming whose bellicose shouts — "I thought I told you to shut up!" — and hostile approach to dairy deposits made him an angry everyman hero. The character became incredibly popular during its '80s run, and a big studio movie was contemplated, with Boswell writing the script, until the project reached a film exec who didn't get the unique, absurd humor of the comic. The rest, as they say, is a cartoonist's life.

While it has a prominent location on 77th Street facing Central Park West, the New-York Historical Society is one of the overlooked gems among New York City Museums. It might be because of that...

At the recently concluded Small Press Expo in Bethesda a very cool thing happened. A bunch of awards were presented to several talented, unique cartoonists who are turning out though provoking, beautifully crafted work, influential work. The winners were all popular and well deserved. And they all happened to be women. It was a thing, for sure, and much talked about. What struck me, first off, was just how strong the work was–Sophie Goldstein's multi leveled future history of a world where having a baby became a rebellious act, Emily Carroll's mastery of horror and structure, Eleanor Davis's powerful examination of self-sabotaging quests for self-esteem in many settings. The other thing that struck me was the contrast with the other conversations I was having at the show. Talking with people I used to work with in the "mainstream" comics industry about the long lists of men who would never have given Goldstein, Carroll or Davis a shot at telling their stories. Because they are women, and those people didn't think women could make good comics.